Surface band bending and surface defects on the UV-transparent conducting oxide β-Ga2O3 (100) are studied with hard x-ray photoemission spectroscopy and scanning tunneling microscopy. Highly doped β-Ga2O3 shows flat bands near the surface, while the bands on nominally undoped (but still n-type), air-cleaved β-Ga2O3 are bent upwards by ≳0.5 eV. Negatively charged surface defects are observed on vacuum annealed β-Ga2O3, which also shows upward band bending. Density functional calculations show oxygen vacancies are not likely to be ionized in the bulk, but could be activated by surface band bending. The large band bending may also hinder formation of ohmic contacts.

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Epitaxial growth of III‐nitrides on 2D materials enables the realization of flexible optoelectronic devices for next‐generation wearable applications. Unfortunately, it is difficult to obtain high‐quality III‐nitride epilayers on 2D materials such as hexagonal BN (h‐BN) due to different atom hybridizations. Here, the epitaxy of single‐crystalline GaN films on the chemically activated h‐BN/Al 2 O 3 substrates is reported, paying attention to interface atomic configuration. It is found that chemical‐activated h‐BN provides B—O—N and N—O bonds, where the latter ones act as effective artificial dangling bonds for following GaN nucleation, leading to Ga‐polar GaN films with a flat surface. The h‐BN is also found to be effective in modifying the compressive strain in GaN film and thus improves indium incorporation during the growth of InGaN quantum wells, resulting in the achievement of pure green light‐emitting diodes. This work provides an effective way for III‐nitrides epitaxy on h‐BN and a possible route to overcome the epitaxial bottleneck of high indium content III‐nitride light‐emitting devices.

We report evidence of the transition from n- to p-type conduction of InN with increasing Mg dopant concentration by using photoconductivity (PC) measurement at room temperature. This transition is depicted as a conversion from negative to positive PC under above-bandgap optical excitation. The n- to p-type transition in InN:Mg is further confirmed by thermopower measurements. PC detection method is a bulk effect since the optical absorption of the surface electron accumulation is negligibly low due to its rather small thickness, and thus shows advantage to detect p-type conduction. This technique is certainly helpful to study p-type doping of InN, which is still a subject of discussions.